Ravens of Eternity

When they were all going at full blast, the whole base shook with a constant tremor. Many nervously looked on as the cracks on the walls spread slowly, and some soil came trickling in.

Thankfully, the ceilings held.

“Captain!” yelled a comms tech. “Pillbox comms just got patched in. The perimeter commander’s now online.”

The captain’s face immediately lit up with joy. She went over to the comms terminal to commend them face-to-face. She went up behind the tech and looked over her shoulder onto her screen.

The commander looked haggard, but there was a lot of fight left in him.

“Commander!” she said. “You all deserve commendations!”

“We’ll take ’em. Those things come with an evac, right?”

.....

She chuckled dryly. She was certain that their only way off the planet was in caskets.

“Hold on,” he continued. “Where’ the major?”

“Got knocked out and getting looked at by medical. We’re on half emergency power and struggling to get everything cycled up. What’s your status?”

“Power’s good. But almost half my boxes are down. And out of what’s left, only about three-fourths of the guns are operational. Bunch of us got torn open in that artillery strike, and are all sorts of open to the world. Only about three or four of us are still pretty damn well armored.”

“How are you on munitions?”

“Gunners from the wrecked pillboxes brought in ammo crates and spare coolant via the maintenance tunnels. So, we’re covered there.”

“Roger. Then we’ll take care of that armor. I’ll send out a couple of RR wings, asap. Send us a priority list, and we’ll take care of them as best we can.”

The commander shook his head.

“No, those blasted Hussars will be back at any time, and they’re gonna come back hard. They’re gonna tear us to pieces, along with anyone else out here. Best keep ’em safe and outta harm’s way.”

The captain immediately hardened. She knew they were going to be back. Or they might even continue with their artillery strike, just to polish the pillboxes off. But she couldn’t just leave them all to die.

Other officers might have easily made the choice to hunker down, but not her.

“All the more reason we gotta get out there and patch you all up! You’re all our last line, and the best way we can keep everyone else safe. Hardening your position is priority one.”

As the two of them spoke, the other captain appeared on their screens. It looked as though he had already suited up and was in a mecha. Although he knew he had to do his duty, it still scared the hell out of him to head outside.

His hands shook with anxiety and fear. But he gripped them around his controls and calmed himself as best he could.

“I heard everything,” he said. “Leave it to me.”

He then turned to another window on his comms display, where he had an open line with the mecha officers. Their faces were displayed on a grid of sixteen, including his own. Some were weary, some were scared, and none of them wanted to be there in the slightest.

But the enemy was at their gates, and now it was time to do or die.

The captain buried his fears and was stern when he gave his orders.

Everyone put together a squadron and pop in least one RR for each wing. We’ve gotta go out there and provide cover and assistance to the remaining pillboxes. I don’t need to tell you that they’re our most important line of defense right now. If we lose ’em, then we’ve pretty much lost everything. Understood?”

“Hooah!” they cried out.

All of the officers quickly reorganized the squadrons, which resulted in each of them commanding four wings of six. In those wings, two of them were RR. The others equipped themselves with the standard ground-based loadout – tower shields and rifles.

This put the majority of their remaining operational mecha out on the field – a mere 384. 71 mecha stayed indoors to help maintain some semblance of an internal defense.

Technically, the bunker had a few hundred more mecha available, but they were in various states of repair. And on top of that, many of their pilots were also too wounded or exhausted or traumatized to keep fighting.

They had five hundred mecha at the very best, and only had a guess at the enemy’s numbers. It was easy for them to assume that there were a couple thousand of them.

Regardless, they still went out with their shields high and their rifles primed. They went through the ruined airlock doors, past the flanking pillboxes, and out to the open killing field.

Eight of the squadrons immediately went for one pillbox each, with the intent of starting repairs on them. Another two stayed by the doors and did their best to dismantle and replace them. Led by the captain, the remaining six patrolled between the pillboxes.

The Seventh squadron came up on the most damaged pillbox and circled it a few times as they surveyed the damage. More than half of the armored dome up top had been torn to pieces by multiple artillery strikes.

What was left had collapsed into the shooting floor itself, with wisps of smoke rising out from inside. Only one of the four guns were still operational – the others were bent and mangled to a great degree.

The best thing they could do was shed some of the more useless armor and give the remaining gun as much protection as they could. The rest was completely unrecoverable.

So when the RR mecha went in to do their thing, the others simply entrenched their tower shields on the ground and kept guard for any danger. Literal walls made of tower shields protected the RR units as they hunkered down and got to work.

On the other side of the hill, another squadron repaired the blast shielding that had become stuck. Since they were rushed to do anything, the only option they had was to shear it off in pieces. If they were struck by another artillery barrage, it would have left the guns vulnerable to the shockwaves.

Two of the RR mecha tugged on the shielding while another cut through it with a plasmacutter. The others closed up any gaps and tears in the armor with their repair guns as diligently as they could.

The two pillboxes that flanked the airlock were damaged, but not to a great degree. Thanks to the hill giving them partial cover, they escaped the wrath of most of the artillery strikes. Only the doors were unlucky enough to get hit directly.

Since these pillboxes were perhaps the most important defensive structures, the squadrons instead spent their time reinforcing it. They took the scrap armor from the other damaged pillboxes, and simply slapped them on with near abandon.

Similarly, the squadrons that fixed the airlock doors had quickly installed new ones, and even reinforced them with parts of the old door. They figured there was no sense in wasting all of that armor.

All the squadrons were busy laying down repairs, upgrading armor, breaking off blast shielding. They worked as quickly and as efficiently as they could. Many pilots were sweating profusely in their cores, but were far too busy to actually wipe their brows.

They were in a situation where life and death was decided with every second that passed, and not a single one could be wasted.

The captain and his squadrons sped between the pillboxes and kept their sensors on full. The last thing they needed was to get ambushed by Hussars. It would have been disastrous if they were caught with their pants down while they were busy doing field repairs.

And each time they stopped at one of the pillboxes, they filled up the RR teams with more repair materials to keep them going.

As they patrolled, they surveyed the destruction that the Hussar artillery had caused. The ground was littered with multiple smouldering craters. At the bottom of each one were slightly deformed tungsten rods, which were still warm from the impact they caused.

The hill itself was the biggest casualty. It was a girthy 400 meter hill, but had been reduced to a mere 100 meter hump. Most of it had been blasted off, and not much was left above the bunker itself.

Layers upon layers of craters covered the area, and hundreds of tungsten rods littered the ground.

On seeing it all, the captain was certain that the bunker wouldn’t have lasted much longer. The scans on his screen confirmed his suspicions. Multiple red warnings flashed on his screen, all of them pointed at different sections of the flattened hill.

He quickly hailed the female captain in the command center to report.

“Home base,” he said. “I’ve reason to believe that the Hussars have run out of artillery munitions. Sensors indicate multiple structural weaknesses, from major to minor. Any further bombardment would cause a massive collapse.”

The female captain shivered as she heard him speak. A few of those in the command center that had heard him involuntarily looked up at the ceiling, and at the large cracks that ran along its length.

“But,” he continued, “they haven’t. They’ve definitely scanned this. There’s no way they haven’t – so my guess is that they literally hit us with everything they got. So, chances are, we’re safe from any more artillery strikes.”

Some of the techs murmured quietly between themselves. It was a bit of a relief that they didn’t die outright, but the threat of the whole thing caving in... It wracked their nerves.

But the captain was determined to keep everyone alive for as long as she could.

“We’re putting systems back online bit by bit,” she said. “Soon, we’ll be back in the green, and all autorepair systems will be back online. We’ll get everything patched up soon enough. All we need is a little time.”

“We’ll get you that time,” he replied.

They nodded to each other, determination in both their eyes.

“Captain!” interjected a tech. “Long range sensors detect a column of Hussars headed in our direction, at speed! ETA, five minutes.”

“Numbers?”

“Eight hundred exactly.”

“Armament?”

“All in C-ranked light polyceramic armor. Two hundred C-ranked stub rifles and shields, the rest... shoulder-mounted CastleBreaker rockets and two-handed Resonance Hammers. Both A-ranked.”

Both captains paled immediately.